


Quintuple Drabble: No One Here But Us Ghosts.

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Comment Fic, Community: fic_promptly, Gen, Quintuple Drabble, Time Period: Reign of Gregor Vorbarra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-28
Updated: 2011-04-28
Packaged: 2017-10-18 18:13:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/191778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quintuple Drabble: No One Here But Us Ghosts.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**philomytha**](http://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/) 's prompt on [](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**fic_promptly**](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/) : _Vorkosigan, Galeni, a night in the ImpSec dungeons feels like forever_.

This is hell. Calculatedly so. He's studied it all, he had a class on the calculated cruelty of it all at ImpSec advanced course training. He understands the architecture of it, the air currents and temperature controls, every disorienting second of it.

He knows this place. This is hell. This is Duv's hell and this is David's hell and he can hear his father in his head, rumbling in his low way he once did when he was planning with his friends during those late night strategy sessions when David had been there as a spectator only, very nearly a mascot and only later a tool, and in his less sane moments, he thinks that was where Duv was born, in those nights, contemplating all that death that was to come, thinking about the ImpSec prison that was everywhere, that was embodied in those stern-faced men with their flashing eyes on their collars, and his father had been the most stern-faced of them all and his eyes had flashed like Horus's never could have, staring into David's soul and making him a monster and a murderer and someone who wasn't any better than the Barrayarans, so what was the point of pretending that he was, and _this is his hell_.

These nights have always been endless in their own ways but tonight he can hear from twenty years in the past his father's voice overlapping with the murmured hush of the guards so far off, and he thinks about murder and the men he's killed and the men he wished he could have and the ones he never did and the blood on his hands is thicker and worse than the invaders could imagine.

"You weren't right," David tells his father's laughing ghost, "this isn't your vindication, _go away_ ," and then he settles in against the wall of the cell to wait for the dawn, the way he always does in his nightmares, because it doesn't matter that it's real this time, the dawn has to come eventually. If there's one thing David knows, it's that. This _will_ end, because there is no hell, there is only _keep going_ , _keep digging_ , because it doesn't end when the bomb explodes, it doesn't end when he identifies their bodies, it doesn't end it doesn't end it doesn't end, it only keeps going even when he's wandering around Solstice, stunned and horrified and ImpSec pulls him in and an ensign barely older than his brother, _but don't think about Nathan, Nathan's dead, and he wouldn't recognize you, you Barrayaran Galeni_ , and someone else who used to be an innocent asks him if he's lost, and he thinks, _little Davvie, lost your dolly_ , but Nathan's dead, too, and his father is, too, finally, and even if dawn is only the light of the firing squad, this will not end tonight, there will be an end to tonight.

David grabs handfuls of his Imperial Security uniform and doesn't scream and knows: this, too, will end.


End file.
